Ouch!

Most of us "war hawks" don't have a problem with the Canadian government attempting to identify the "root causes," only with the particular root cause they settled on: Poverty. The late Osama bin Laden was a wealthy man. Wealthier even than Jean Chretien, who's spent his entire adult life in government service except for six months in the late Eighties but has happily wound up a multi-millionaire. If M. Chretien feels he's too rich (as we must assume he does), how much more excessively rich is the late Mr. Weirdbeard? Or Saddam Hussein, whose personal fortune is estimated at US$7-billion, a career in public service in Baghdad apparently being even more lucrative than one in Ottawa. And let's not forget the representative two or three hundred Saudi princes currently accompanying King Fahd on his convalescence in Spain. A lucky London escort agency has landed the contract for servicing the Saudi swingers: The gals all have to be blonde and they're replaced every week, having been thoroughly rogered out by then.

So we could increase foreign aid. It would enable Saddam to expand his anthrax factory and the House of Saud to rotate its hookers every 48 hours. But would it do anything else? Under the terms of the Camp David accords, Egypt has been the beneficiary of the largest amount of U.S. aid apart from Israel. What's happened to it? In the 1950s, Egypt and South Korea had more or less identical per capita incomes. Today, Egypt's is less than a fifth of South Korea's.

(via InstaPundit)

It mentions Xavier Sala-i-Martin's widely cited The World Distribution Of Income

While searching for Sala-i-Martin, I came across this, which led me to Gerontocracy, Retirement, and Social Security, which I can read when I'm in a good mood.